History of this Series List
Students often ask about book series when visiting our school media center. Sometimes they know the number of the book they want to read, but not the title. Other times, students need help finding a series written by several authors. If multiple authors contributed to a series, the books will be located on various shelves. This presents a challenge because the books are arranged by the author's last name, not by the name of the series. Furthermore, while online catalogs allow students to search by series, the order of the series is not always clear or user friendly.
Our library created a helpful text resource to answer these series questions and stored it in a three-ring binder. When I learned HTML in order to create my first website in graduate school, I dreamed of displaying this series list online. This resource would be more accessible than the one binder currently available. An online series list could be managed by one person, yet benefit any number of users who could access the internet. As I began creating required webpages for graduate school, I developed additional webpages which I hoped would list all the series information. Then I humbly discovered I needed to learn more than HTML to create this list. So far, I knew how to display text and pictures online. If I displayed all the information on the screen, then users would have to scroll through pages and pages of information. There had to be a better way to organize the Series List.
My next graduate project was about databases. Databases make information easy to retrieve. I presented this idea to a group of fellow graduate students. Our group completed a conceptual of The Series List and turned the project in for class credit.
Later, I found a server to host the series list and purchased a domain name, Librarycorner.info. Then I learned more about HTML, SQL and PHP to make the information accessible to all. PHP is the computer language that makes this site dynamic. A dynamic site retrieves information on demand. Instead of reading through an overwhelming and complete list of series information, users can select a specific path from an organized page. I hope this site helps you. I sure had fun seeing it all come together and will continue to update the list. The LibraryCorner was created to make the Series List possible, but has the potential to offer much more. Whatever you dream of can come true if you work successfully with others and believe in yourself.